Publisher's Synopsis
"Labors in Vineyards of Desire is a grand, sweeping chronicle of our time, filled with particulars transcendent and mundane, questioned and understood in light of the poet's astonishing erudition and ferocious appetite for life. Gibbons entertains nearly every version of each of our era's events, refracting them through the intensely personal prism of his learning and his longing...I believe it is a masterpiece of autobiography." -Richard Hoffman, author of the memoirs Half the House and Love and Fury
"Robert Gibbons' Labors is something like the story of ethics of writing. The term may sound pretentious, a typical academic's line, and maybe unsuited to the directness and honesty of the author's style. But the term is apposite as we read a voice trying to analyze or weigh up the choices, sacrifices, struggles that get you to be a writer." -Ben Bollig, Oxford University, Modern Argentine Poetry: Displacement, Exile, Migration
"I think Gibbons has written a very important book, the likes of which we don't often encounter today; indeed, the likes of which is practically unknown in a tragically post-literate time such as ours. Though modernist, even postmodernist in conception, it is also an old fashioned book, a book about a writer's formation, much as Pasternak's Safe Passage was. I can't think of such a book having been written in the US in recent years."-Peter Anastas, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester
"In this remarkable memoir Robert Gibbons weds lucid prose about his past to the poetry of contemporary life. Gibbons recalls with insight, honesty, and humor the physical, spiritual, and intellectual journeys he undertook as he wrote his way across the late twentieth and on into the twenty-first century." -Charles Brock, Curator of American and British Paintings, National Gallery of Art, author of Charles Sheeler: Across Media
"Gibbons is the new Henry Miller, with less overt sex but many times more sensual." -Tim Gillis, The Portland Phoenix
Robert Gibbons is the author of ten books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, and a unique study of the affinities in approaches to art in language by Charles Olson and that of Clyfford Still in paint: Olson/Still: Crossroad. He was poetry and fiction editor of the interdisciplinary journal Janus Head from 2004-2011. His book Jagged Timeline was translated into Danish by Bent Sørensen of Aalborg University, and work is forthcoming in the Journal of Italian Translation via Gianluca Rizzo of Colby College. In 2006 he was awarded a John Anson Kittredge Education Fund grant to travel and read his work at the Poetry and Politics Conference at the University of Stirling, Scotland. There, he met Ben Bollig, now at Oxford, who recorded the meeting online, writing that "he is the most passionate advocate of poetry I have met." National Book Award Finalist, William Heyen calls Gibbons "one of the great writers of our time." In 2013 the poet was invited to give the Creative Keynote Address, which he titled, Kerouac & the Ecstatic Act of Writing, at the 2nd annual European Beat Studies Conference held at Aalborg University. Along with his wife, Kathleen, he was a staff writer for The Quarterly Review of Wines, when in 1994 they were guests of Piper-Heidsieck Champagne at the Cannes Film Festival, where Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. A resident of Portland, Maine for over a decade, during which time he published seven books, prompted former chairman of PEN New England, Richard Hoffman, to write, "Gibbons is in the process of sacralizing Portland, lodging it in the imagination of readers, as Williams did for Paterson, Cavafy for Alexandria, Joyce for Dublin."
